This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

It was nearly 20 years ago that Allan Walsh sat in a courtroom in Los Angeles, awaiting the verdict of the murder trial that would rearrange his life.

Walsh, now one of hockey’s most visible player agents, was pursuing a different calling in those days. He prosecuted violent crime in the Hardcore Gang Division of L.A.’s justice system. In his more than six years as a deputy district attorney, he tried some 40 murder cases. All of them consumed his life. One of them still clings tight.

“I think about that case every day still,” Walsh says.

The trial in question came in the wake of the brutal slaying of Christopher Jeremiah, who was stabbed and shot to death in a carjacking. Christopher was a high school honours student of bright-eyed promise who’d just earned admittance to a prestigious university, and Walsh remembers that his death “destroyed” his family in more ways than one. Weeks after the murder Christopher’s father, lying in bed next to Christopher’s mother, awoke from an apparent nightmare, told his wife “I see Christopher . . . he’s talking to me,” and died of a heart attack.

But the case was no slam dunk. Two gang members stood accused of putting a knife through Christopher’s heart and a bullet through his head in the act of stealing the SUV Christopher had been driving. But there were a zillion obstacles to two convictions, not least that the only credible witness was one of the defendant’s girlfriends who, after weeks of persuasion, finally agreed to enter the witness protection program and testify.

Article Continued Below

As the trial dragged on for months, Walsh worked seven days a week. His nights were often sleepless. His blood pressure rose. His hair started to fall out. He lost some 15 pounds.

“I thought this case was going to kill me,” says Walsh now. “And it’s really one of the things that has impacted my entire life. If you try a murder case the right way, you’re giving a little piece of your soul to the case.”

In the end, separate juries found both defendants guilty of murder. For Walsh, never have two victories felt like anything but.

“I got so emotionally attached to the case, when the verdict came back guilty, I was sobbing, sobbing. The judge was crying. The jury was crying. Everybody in the courtroom was crying. You could hear the sobs over this wonderful, 18-year-old, wasted life. It impacted a lot of people,” Walsh said. “After it was over I remember calling my dad and I said, ‘I don’t think I can ever try another case.’ . . . You only have so many pieces of your soul to give away.”

Walsh never gave away another. Months after the verdict, after tendering his resignation, he found himself in the office of David Schatia, a one-time hockey agent based in Walsh’s native Montreal. An avowed fan of Les Canadiens, Walsh had grown up playing the game as a goaltender. In one of the great moments of his young life — this after he survived a burst appendix around age 7 — his father arranged for him to meet his hero, Ken Dryden, who shepherded Walsh around the Montreal dressing room introducing him to the members of one of hockey’s all-time great rosters.

Brimming with what Schatia remembered as “incredible passion,” it wasn’t long before Walsh had convinced Schatia to become his partner in a start-up hockey agency.

“He was like a pit bull,” remembers Schatia. “He wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

Walsh and Schatia built offices in Montreal and L.A. and Europe. About a decade later, in 2004, they sold the business to agency giant Octagon, for which Walsh continues to work. Walsh currently represents a long list of well-known players, from Pittsburgh goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury to San Jose forward Martin Havlat. But he is perhaps best known as an irrepressible voice on Twitter, where his frequent posts are always interesting and often controversial. As the NHL lockout drags toward its fourth week, he has been his usual vociferous self.

On Thursday Walsh tweeted: “It’s become perfectly clear that Gary Bettman cannot continue in his position. It’s time for a new commissioner.”

Darren Dreger, the TSN insider, fired back: “Pour a glass of red and chill Allan. Way too early for the drama you’re promoting.”

Replied Walsh to Dreger: “Sorry I’ve been offending your close friends on Twitter.”

For Walsh, who is 47 years old and based in L.A., it was a typical evening of smartphone sparring.

“A lot of people like him for it and a lot of people hate him for it,” says Havlat. “He does anything to help his players. And now he’s helping the whole union and all of the players with his comments (on Twitter). He’s always honest. He speaks from his heart, and he doesn’t care what anybody thinks. Sometimes when you say the truth publicly, you’re hurting a lot of people. . . . Sometimes the truth hurts.”

To Walsh, the truth behind the lockout goes like this:

“It’s clear to most people that the NHL has been planning this lockout for a long time. It’s clear, with the way the NBC deal was negotiated and the $200 million payment whether games are played or not, that the NHL has been laying the groundwork for this lockout for a significant period of time. Based on the best offer on the table before Sept. 15, it’s clear the NHL never made a serious attempt to make a deal before declaring a lockout,” Walsh says. “The powers that be in the NHL feel they will get a much better deal from the players once the players are softened up and locked out over a period of time. And there was no serious interest on the league’s side to make a deal.”

How will it end?

“I have no idea,” he says.

It’s here that Walsh points out that when he tweets or speaks, he’s not doing so in the name of his players or the players’ union. He’s giving his opinion, sharing what he feels is pertinent information. He says that, judging from the responses he gets on Twitter, some fans erroneously consider him a spokesman for the NHLPA.

“I want to make sure lines don’t get crossed and people don’t mistake the fact — ‘Hey, if Allan Walsh is saying it, that must be the official PA position.’ Because there’s actually been very little communication between me and the PA about anything I may tweet,” he says. “But at the end of the day, it’s no secret where my allegiances lie.”

Walsh, for his part, says it’s always been his nature to “stand up for the little guy.” He says people are quick to forget a not-so-distant past when sports owners paid little heed to the rights of their players. Schatia, who’s a generation older than Walsh and once represented Hall of Fame pitcher Ferguson Jenkins, remembers a time when he arrived at Wrigley Field to negotiate Jenkins’ contract with the Cubs, only to be told by the team: “We don’t talk to agents.”

Players’ salaries have grown with the owners’ profits, of course, but clearly the ballooning wealth hasn’t quelled that tension, and Walsh makes no apologies for pointing out what he sees as inequity. It’s been nearly 20 years since his job surrounded his life in a bleak cycle of violence and death, but don’t tell Walsh the hockey business is a bloodless passion.

As Schatia says of his protege: “He reads and he lives and he breathes hockey to the point where it’s unusual, to say the least. He doesn’t do anything halfway.”

Walsh laughs a little and acknowledges the obvious. He’s long removed from the courtroom, and he’ll argue with you about almost anything. But to the charge of obsessiveness, he understands he has no defence.

“When I was a DA, I was someone who was outraged by crime. . . . Every time I walked into a courtroom trying a murder case, I thought to myself, ‘This is the last opportunity that the person who was killed in a violent and tragic way will have a voice seeking some measure of justice,’ ” he says. “Not to compare victims of violent crime to hockey players, but there are hockey players whose careers and lives sometimes are put into risk or jeopardy. They’re not treated with respect. They’re not treated fairly. It’s not an everyday occurrence, but when players don’t know where else to turn to, they need to know their agent is willing to stand up and fight for them. I think a lot of people are not willing to do that, because they’re afraid of making waves. That’s the one thing I’ve never been afraid to do.”

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com